As a pioneer scholar of women’s history, I approached this book with considerable interest and anticipation. After all, the field of European women’s history today stands at the crossroads of many vibrant scholarly debates. And it also has been at the center of innovation and change in the discipline of history itself. As I expected, this collection draws on many of the innovations in ‘doing’ women’s history developed over the past several decades. It also sets a new thematic and methodological agenda for exploring the structural and discursive worlds negotiated by different women in the societies of the European past since 1700.
Women’s history, as is well known, emerged in tandem with the second wave of feminism in the West starting in the late 1960s, part of a transnational political movement deeply committed to the importance of history for social change. History mattered a great deal; it showed indeed that new social movements sustain and, in turn, are supported by research agendas that reframe the past in innovative ways, raising previously marginalized groups to new prominence. Like my own, the careers of many of the early pioneers combined feminist social advocacy outside the academy with teaching a new curricula inside and developing women’s studies programs, which still serve as sites of interdisciplinary dialogues as well as places of sociability and guardians of equity.
This pioneer generation made a seemingly obvious yet, as it turns out, still profoundly challenging observation. The traditional academic field of history, which became part of the university curriculum in the early nineteenth century, had developed essentially with no regard to women’s diverse lives and worlds. Its organizational and conceptual schemas as well as its working paradigms claimed to describe a universal human past while, in effect, drawing only on men’s experiences in so-called public life - in state politics, diplomacy, the economy, the military, and in wartime, to mention the traditional subfields of history. Yet, women have always lived in history. What does it mean to write a history that credits women’s and men’s lives? A question as valid and radical today as it was thirty years ago. Demonstrating the partial nature of the discipline of history, early works in herstory recovered a lost past and, in the process, began to shake up many fundamental assumptions in the wider discipline concerning matters of causality, significance, the frames for historical periods, turning points, and markers, as well as the biological basis of sex differences. The inclusion of women rewrote the parameters of class, one of the key working concepts in modern history. It drew attention to arenas beyond the points of production in factories or at construction sites that traditionally were seen to shape class consciousness, and it turned attention also to issues of reproduction and family life, neighborhood solidarities, and patterns of consumption. And the new focus on women began to critically examine the unspoken polarities that long had guided historical work: the separation of public and private spheres, of family and state, as well as of production and reproduction. The title of the book I published with Marilyn J. Boxer in 1987 put on the research agenda the important goal of Connecting Spheres.1 Perhaps not surprisingly at all, the intellectual ferment generated by the challenges of women’s history prepared the groundwork for the receptivity of gender analysis, now a vital component of recent historical scholarship and very much present in this book.
Over the years, the field of women’s history has not lost its original connection to social activism, although the ties have become somewhat more attenuated. The attention of many women’s historians has shifted to the broad-based feminist advocacy networks of the global women’s human-rights movements just as practitioners in the field of European history, which also is the focus of this volume, confront the rigors of global scrutiny through tight interconnections made possible by the Internet and ease of global communications. Whether at United Nations-sponsored world conferences on women (held, for example, in Mexico City, Mexico in 1975, in Nairobi, Kenya in 1985 and in Beijing, China in 1995), specific interregional gatherings or cross-cultural symposia on global themes, feminist advocates from the West confront feminist advocates from many other regions of the globe. Each group, importantly, brings its own sense of history to these international and cross-cultural debates. History matters once again and globalization entails as much a rewriting of the historical meta-narratives as renegotiating the pace, nature, and social costs of economic integration and development.
This rewriting project points to considerable transformations in the field of European history itself. Thirty years ago, mainstream modern European historians wrote their history with little connection to the rest of the world outside of the patterns of colonial settlements and imperial domination. European intellectual, political, and economic developments in the nation-states were seen to be singular yet normative, somehow, for the rest of the world, an assumption that influenced the way nonWestern scholars wrote and thought about their own specific historical pasts. This simple diffusionist model from the European center outward has come under critical scrutiny by both postcolonial scholars and European historians committed to a global dialogue. Emblematic of authors of this new literature is Dipesh Chakrabarty, whose compelling title Provincializing Europe also captures a new agenda.2 Chakrabarty’s objective is to turn European history away from its claims to be universally valid and normative for human development and place it as one of many studies of complex regions in interaction with other global components. In particular, for the processes of diffusion he draws critical attention to the hegemonic role of European historical thought with its notions of linear time and belief in progress. Chakrabarty makes the argument, however, by generally neglecting the complexity of European thought and by specifically excluding the role of European women’s history, which, from its early inception, emerged to critique the very notion of progress inherent in the dominant European narrative. This was the main point of Joan Kelly’s 1977 seminal essay ‘Did Women Have A Renaissance?’3 Increasingly, many European women’s historians have been doing double duty, so to speak. They are part of a genre of feminist historiography in global dialogue, determined not to make European women’s history normative and prescriptive for assessing the lives of women in other parts of the world and, thus, willing to ‘provincialize’ diverse European women’s historic experiences in the context of global patterns. And, in the process, they see Europe as one among many areas in the world, shaped and reshaped by its continuous interaction with other regions, peoples, cultures, and religions. This is a profound change in the discipline of history, to be sure.
So, where do I place this book among the many cross-currents of contemporary intellectual debates and research? I begin with a number of observations. The authors of the chapters center their analysis on the regional clustering of western and central Europe. In this sense, they are challenging the long tradition of history-writing in both women’s and European history that privileges national histories and the nation-state as the central analytical units. In the main, modern European history from 1700 has been written from the perspective of the distinct social, political, economic, and cultural developments of the nation-state; students, as you know, typically specialize in British history or in the history of the countries of the continent such as France or Germany or Italy; historians also write women’s history through the prism of national narratives. If they engage in comparative work, say, of the political strategies of different women’s movements to gain political suffrage or the transnational linkages developed to abolish state-sanctioned sex in the early twentieth century, the comparisons usually are made on the basis of presumed unified national societies. But Europe is more than the sum of its nation-states, a point brought home well by the transnational thematic focus of this book. While the authors continue to draw on discrete historiographies and empirical examples from national settings (and thus you will see references to so-called German or French or even Nordic developments as if they were homogenized and unified nations) the book is fundamentally a different narrative of the European past over the three centuries under analysis.
As a broader regional study encompassing a number of distinct countries, it repositions the components of historical developments. Thus, it argues for the importance of transnational educational projects for girls that became central to subsequent crossnational feminist reform movements for broadening women’s life chances. These same projects also contained powerful discourses on proper family life and civilized behavior limiting many women’s options, which were institutionalized at home and exported abroad. The book looks at leisure time as a vehicle to assess middle-class women’s increasing access to public life, from all manner of political-party activities before enfranchisement to volunteer work in municipal charity and poor-relief institutions, such as orphanages, to the gender patterns of consumption expressing new identities and connections with the wider world. It demonstrates the centrality of the discourses and regulations of sexuality for the joint projects of state - and empire-building.
Furthermore, the thematic approach continues to encourage reassessment of longstanding interpretive arguments, helping break down, in particular, many different polarities at the root of much of the existing scholarship. The perspective on women’s work in urban, protoindustrial and industrial settings demonstrates unmistakably the need to interconnect the levels of work and home; even the nineteenth-century bourgeois family was never merely a ‘private’ institution. Examinations of the impact of war on society not only destroys the tired adage that ‘war is men’s business’; it also shows the continuity of women’s active involvement in war not only as passive victims but also as early modern camp followers providing many necessary services to soldiers from sex to the procurement of medical and material supplies to cooking and, with professional militaries in the nineteenth century, in the development of gendered medical war corps for the continental and colonial troops. The new focus critiques the assumption of women’s motherly identities as inherently peaceful and men’s as aggressive and warlike, bringing the construction of femininity and masculinity into wartime analysis. Importantly, it not only demonstrates the necessity of incorporating perspectives on society into the writing of warfare but also inexorably links the battlefield and homefront as one analytical field. The authors in this collection also argue for rethinking the divisions between amateur and professional and the so-called high and low culture and offer a rich tapestry of women’s contributions to the cultural flourishings in Europe, from the performing arts to the writing of novels to cinema and photography, in this way continuing to rehabilitate a lost history.
True to the project of unsettling fixed boundaries, the themes push beyond Europe’s borders and into colonial regimes, reinforcing a growing scholarship that draws the colonial periphery right into the heart of empire, to borrow again from a title of an influential work on Britain.4 Authors in this volume, too, make similar connections. The chapters on sexuality, education, and consumption explicitly are demonstrating the parallels between, for example, reform projects to reshape working-class sexuality at home and similar patterns of regulation in British India or the deployment of notions of civilized behavior through girls’ proper education into both domestic societies as well as native colonial ones. Throughout the period, European women identified with and participated in empire. Supported by colonial societies in the late nineteenth century, for example, they encouraged and directed so-called ‘respectable’ women’s emigration to the colonies, with the effect of heightening the racial divides by establishing normative family life among the white colonial administrators and settlers. At home, many patriotic women’s organizations set up theaters and bazaars to raise money for colonial troops and military expeditions; open to the broader urban public, these exhibits put on display all manner of colonial goods such as Cameroon chocolates or New Guinea cigarettes and other ‘exotica’ from distant lands, even including the ‘natives’ in the flesh: ‘the small Ferida’, daughter of Emin Pascha; ‘Joli’ brought from New Guinea by the German Anthropological Society; the ‘Negro’ of Dr. Ehler from Mauritius, to mention but one bazaar organized by the Berlin branch of the German Women’s Association for Medical Services in the Colonies in 1903.5 An emerging consumer culture increasingly was using patriotic messages for the sale of goods. Through these routes, patriotic and imperial cultures were becoming integrated into new consumption and leisure patterns, helping to make their messages part of the everyday exchange of goods. For the rural population, there also were mobile exhibits demonstrating the benefits of public health and sanitation and drawing implicit parallels between public hygiene and the promises of modern scientific warfare.
Of course, the connections are not only with formal empires, those areas of the globe under European colonial administration as part of a renewed imperialism of the late nineteenth century. New gender work patterns outside guild restrictions in the burgeoning textile home workshops from Lancashire to Normandy to Flanders, the Rhineland and the Saxon Oberlausitz in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reflected the impact of the Atlantic economy on western and central European societies. As part of a rising demand for linen and hemp, peasant villagers became protoindustrial peasant-workers engaged in manufacturing for export as part of a trade economy in slaves, coffee, tea, sugar, and indigo, as well as in light but durable textiles. Indeed, the urban baroque architecture, which still captures the imagination of so many tourists to European cities and towns, reflects the invested wealth generated by this new colonial Atlantic trade.
The focus on the multiplicity and interconnections of peoples in European society (as opposed to established national units) also works to challenge master-narratives of the European past. This is particularly true in new studies that are being done on religion, matters of faith, and the impact of religious institutions and rituals on men and women’s lives in the past. Such interest brings into question the once-powerful linear assumptions behind the transition from early modern to modern societies. In particular, this transition was expressed in the evolution from so-called sacral communities of the late medieval world to the confessional states in Britain and Europe as a result of the Reformation and Catholic revival, culminating in the ongoing processes of secularization, hailed as one of the major characteristics of the ‘modern’ era in Europe. Importantly, religious forms, identities, and communities continue to be relevant social and political markers up until the present, coexisting and also competing with other identities, including the pulls of gender, ethnicity, and nation. By demonstrating the centrality of marginal groups to society, a different picture of religious developments also emerges, as the chapter on religion and women demonstrates. It maps out a completely distinct terrain for the discussion, no longer placing sole emphasis on the impact of Christianity on European thought and institutions. Rather, it brings into focus in the region of Europe the interactions among and between the peoples and communities of the three monotheistic religions - Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Both Judaism and Islam are not peripheral but integral to European history, shaped by and shaping Christian identities, institutions, and ritual practices through both contact and confrontation. The history of this interaction, of course, offers dramatic challenges to the explosive contemporary debates about the clash of presumed ‘alien’ cultures and civilizations - as the presence of so many Muslim immigrants (from former European colonies) and former guestworkers-turned-legal-residents from Turkey living today in contemporary western and central European societies seem to raise for Christian Europe. Their numbers have grown since decolonization and the end of the formal guestworker programs in 1974. Importantly, the polarized debates are often fought most dramatically around the life choices and options for women. The attention to gender analysis and women’s experiences in the chapters of this book will help you understand why women often become the symbolic centers of debates around politics and power, cultural integrity, and, more recently, the dislocating processes of economic globalization.
Each of the themes in this book, of course, cannot be separated out so neatly in the ways women and men went about their daily lives in the past. The themes are differentiated for purposes of analysis. Indeed, the authors are very much aware of the overlaps, demonstrating from different perspectives how family, labor, and leisure interact; how, in some cases, household patterns and gender work divisions structure economic development and the location of factories, and how contested notions of masculinity and femininity help shape educational and cultural systems as well as the bases of political membership and citizenship. The book, thus, has to be read as an integrated whole. All the authors, however, are committed, through various methodological routes and against different backdrops, to maintaining the focus on European women in the past - however diverse this category is in terms of location, religion, class, and nationality. Some see their project still in terms of filling in the gaps in our knowledge of women’s multiple contributions, for example, to the production, display, and consumption of European high culture. For other authors, women’s lives cannot be extracted from the gender system that is then placed as a backdrop for analysis and assessment. The commitment in this case is to women and gender, complementing the historical methodology in the pioneer works on women’s history by recognizing the powerful gender system that shapes and is reshaped by the ways women as agents make use of their own experiences as they interact with men to impact family lives, to bring their own needs as sexual beings into work-related struggles, and to carve out space for interventions into public life as well. Only one chapter explores women’s organized movements for feminist reform, representing a divergence from once-standard European women’s history texts, which used feminism as the starting point for the analysis; the book maintains the ties between historical investigation and study and a present moment that is committed to greater justice and equality. The collection demonstrates unmistakably the ongoing effects of women’s history and gender analysis in challenging and enriching understandings of modern European history.
World History
